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Pushing the limits on the
fringe
May 3, 2015
Carly Fiorina says
environmentalists created California’s
drought. Mike Huckabee’s urging would-be recruits to boycott the military until
President Barack Obama leaves office. Ben Carson
compared gay marriage to bestiality and pedophilia.
This week, they’re all going
to become official candidates for president, and the fringes of the Republican
field will get notably fringier.
From Herman Cain to Tom
Tancredo, long-shot candidates have invoked uncompromising stances on issues
backed up by ultra-strong rhetoric to draw attention to their causes and,
mostly, themselves. But this time around, with a dozen more-plausible
Republican candidates competing for attention and a digital media landscape
that always finds room for spectacle, long-shot candidates are working harder
than ever to make names for themselves with eyebrow-raising statements that
drive clicks and cable segments.
“In a world without cable or
the Internet, everybody writes a fun story about Donald Trump running for
president and then they go back to work,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican
political strategist and the director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of
Politics at the University
of Southern California.
Marginal candidates couldn’t expect sustained coverage, he said. “There just
wasn’t room in The Washington Post for them.”
Now, said Schnur, “Even a
little bit of media attention is enough oxygen for a race that wouldn’t have
existed a quarter-century ago.” In just the past couple of weeks, Trump, who
has hired staffers in Iowa and New Hampshire but not announced a run, has made
headlines for tweeting, “Nobody but Donald Trump will save Israel,” and “Our
great African American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the
thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!” and retweeting, then
deleting, a crack about Hillary Clinton being unable to satisfy her husband (he
blamed a staffer for that one).
The incentives for these
candidacies have never been stronger. Hopeless candidates have always run for
vanity, pet issues or a spot on the bottom of a ticket. Now, for no-shot
candidates who can call attention to themselves, running for president has
become an attractive business and lifestyle proposition. Book sales, media gigs
and speaking invitations roll in for years to come.
Cain’s brief run for the
Republican nomination in 2011, cut short by a sexual harassment scandal, set a
new standard for this kind of run. The former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza briefly
led in national polls despite having never held elective office. What he did do
was make attention-grabbing statements: insisting that China was “trying to
develop nuclear capability” 40 years after the country got the bomb, saying
that American communities could ban the building of mosques, and promising,
“When they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m
going to say, ‘You know, I don’t know.’” After achieving national celebrity,
Cain got a radio show, became a Fox News contributor and wrote a book.
“People like me were kind of
appalled that he was treated like a serious candidate and a credible person,”
said Fergus Cullen, chairman of the New Hampshire Republican party at the time.
“People like you had to write articles that took him seriously. … So all that
does is encourage more, right? There’s no price to be paid for running for
president.”
This cycle, anyone who wants to
follow Cain’s playbook faces a tougher task. There are more candidates — and
more credible candidates — in the Republican field than at any time in recent
memory. In Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, there’s a plausible, if still long-shot,
contender for the nomination who plays to the party’s right wing and possesses
a special talent for winning the spotlight with incendiary
statements of his own. Try topping Cruz’s message to Republicans who would
give up the fight to defund Obamacare: “Look, we saw in Britain,
Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, ‘Accept the Nazis. Yes,
they’ll dominate the continent of Europe, but
that’s not our problem. Let’s appease them. Why? Because it can’t be done. We
can’t possibly stand against them.’”
In circumstances like this,
marginal members of the field risk getting lost in the mix. “I was surprised at
the [New Hampshire GOP Republican Leadership Summit] cattle call in Nashua a couple weeks ago
that more of the candidates didn’t do anything that was calculated to get a
rise, and as a result I think a lot of them blended together,” said Cullen. The
next weekend, Fiorina, a former Hewlett Packard CEO and failed California
Senate candidate who’s never held office, declared at a Republican summit in
Iowa that she’s got as much foreign policy experience as Hillary Clinton — and
made news by doing it.
The last time Mike Huckabee
ran for president, in 2008, he had just finished two terms as a popular
governor in Arkansas, and he parlayed
evangelical support into a first-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. Huckabee didn’t hold back
from expressing his staunch social conservative views then, but “this time
around,” said Cullen, “there doesn’t seem to be any pretense that he’s doing
this as a serious person.” In infomercials, Huckabee’s been hawking a diabetes
treatment described
as “dubious” by The New York Times.
He’s had to leave his gig as
a Fox News analyst as he explores a run, but the station’s still been a forum
for him to up the ante and get attention. “Everything he does is against what
Christians stand for, and he’s against the Jews in Israel,” Huckabee said of Obama on
“Fox & Friends” in February. “The one group of people that can know they
have his undying, unfailing support would be the Muslim community. It doesn’t
matter whether it’s the radical Muslim community or the more moderate Muslim
community.”
Huckabee and anyone else who
keeps their name in national headlines can expect more money-making
opportunities to await them when they reach the end of their line, even if they
don’t win many votes.
Carson, who jumped the gun
Sunday on his own kickoff announcement by disclosing his candidacy to an Ohio
TV station, became a darling of right-wing media and a celebrity after he
touted a flat tax and health savings accounts in Obama’s presence at the 2013
National Prayer Breakfast.
Carson’s low-key style is a marked departure from the
flamboyance of Trump or Cain, and he often seems surprised when his statements
on gay marriage, or on the admirable
side of the Islamic State group, prompt firestorms. But those firestorms only
help keep his following alive.
Carson will officially announce in Detroit on Monday. Fiorina will also announce
Monday — in an online video. Huckabee will announce Tuesday in his hometown of Hope, Arkansas.
What Trump will do and say next is anybody’s guess.
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